Homeland (42 page)
She snuffled up her snot and wiped her cheeks on my T-shirt and let go of me. "Well," she said, with a sad smile, "nice to see you again, Marcus. I'll look you up the next time I'm in the neighborhood."
"Yeah," I said. "Sounds good."
The door opened downstairs and my parents' voices came up through the vents, talking about money worries and what to have for dinner. We stood, eyes locked, until they moved into the kitchen, then we descended the stairs in silence. I opened the front door and Masha slipped out into the street, limping down Potrero Hill with her gym bag over her shoulder. I watched her until she turned onto 24th Street, but she never looked back at me.
Then I went inside and told my parents I'd lost my job.
Ange could tell something was up from the minute I called her, I could hear it in her voice, and she met me at a burrito joint around the corner from Noisebridge, coming straight to the table and sitting down opposite me without a hug or a kiss or any of the other normal pleasantries.
"I saw Masha," I said. "And she spoke to Johnstone's people, and they say it's over."
"Over," she said, flatly.
"As in, we don't have anything to do with them, they don't have anything to do with us. Over."
"Oh," she said. She bit her lip, the way she did when she was thinking hard. "Over. You believe her."
"Yeah," I said. "I do."
"Oh."
I'd thought about this next part a thousand times, rehearsed every way it could go, hated all of them, decided I needed to do it anyway.
"Ange," I said.
She started crying before I said anything else, so I guess my voice must have conveyed some secret message to her in the cipher known only to our bodies and subconscious minds.
"What comes after this?" I said, trying to keep my voice even. Other people in the restaurant were staring at us, even though I'd deliberately staked out a place in the back corner.
"What do you mean?" she said, taking napkins out of the dispenser on the table and wiping at her eyes.
"I mean, do we just keep dating forever? Do we get married?"
"You..." She blinked. "You want to get married?"
"No," I said. "Do you?"
"No," she said.
"Ever?"
"Well, I don't know. Maybe."
"But not to me."
"I didn't say that, Marcus. Jesus, you're being such a freak. Are you breaking up with me?"
I willed myself not to flinch away from her angry gaze. "I just feel like there comes a point where you have to ask yourself: is this going to go on forever, or isn't it? Are we doing this for the long haul, or is this just something we're doing for now?"
"That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard," she said. "This isn't binary. We can be boyfriend and girlfriend without being husband and wife. We're young. What the hell is this all about?"
I thought about the weird silences with Van, the kiss with Masha, the times I'd woken up next to Ange and just watched her breathe, in love with every curve and angle of her face. "I --" I thought about being a person who did things, instead of someone that the world did stuff to. I thought about the system and how broken it all was. "Look, it's been intense lately. I don't know what I'm feeling anymore. I'm just not sure about anything anymore."
"That's it? You're not
sure
? Since when was anything
sure
? Listen, you lunk, you say that you're not sure about anything. Are you sure that you're happier when you're with me than when I'm not there? Not all the time, but on balance, most of the time?"
It was such a weird, Ange way of framing the question. But I gave it thought. "Yeah," I said. "Yeah, I am sure about that. But, Ange --"
She wadded up the napkin and dropped it on the table. "That's something I'm sure of, too. But you're clearly going through some crazy mental crap, and if you need to work it out, you need to work it out. Give me a call when you've sorted it out. Maybe I'll still be around."
It took everything I had not to chase after her as she left the burrito place, but I stayed in my seat, facing away from the door, staring at the burrito cooling in front of me. I gave her a decent interval to get a ways down Mission Street, then I left the place myself, leaving the food untouched.
I hung around across the street from the Joe Noss for State Senate campaign office, wearing trackpants, a hooded sweatshirt and carrying a gym-bag, figuring that what worked for Masha would probably work for me. Autumn was on us, and the sun had set early, making me just one more anonymous, slightly menacing guy with his hands in his pockets on a street in the upper Mission. But I wasn't clutching a vial of rock. I was holding onto a USB stick.
I hadn't been able to talk this over with anyone. Talking to Darryl meant talking to Van, and that meant being a theoretically single man talking to his theoretical best friend's girlfriend who had some kind of theoretical crush on him that might or might not be theoretically mutual. Jolu was busy with Kylie, because what had failed so miserably for me had worked really well for him. And of course, there was no way to talk to Ange about anything now, and maybe never again.
Liam left the building. Then the speechwriter and the researchers whose names I forgot. Then some volunteers, with Flor behind them. I was sure I'd seen Joe go in there, but Flor locked the door behind her, so maybe I'd missed Joe somehow. But I'd seen a few lights on inside the office as she shut the door, and so I hung tight. Joe came out twenty minutes later, wearing his Joe uniform, his cardigan buttoned high against the chill night.
I crossed the street and matched his stride. He looked at me, did a double take.
"Hello, Marcus," he said, his voice gentle and unconcerned. Statesmanlike.
I held out my closed fist, hand down. "Here," I said.
He held his hand out, let me transfer the USB stick to him. He felt it, put it in his pocket.
"Do I want to know what this is?"
"No," I said. "But your friend in the FBI might."
"Aha," he said, and patted his pocket. "Well, I'll take that under advisement."
We walked on for a few steps.
"Is this going to get me into trouble, Marcus?"
"No," I said.
"Is it going to get
you
into trouble?"
"Don't know," I said. "Are you going to win the election?"
"It seems likely," he said. "That vote machine idea of yours. Woah. Though nothing's certain in politics."
"I know," I said. "I'm a member of the network. I recruited sixteen people from my contact list. Maybe I'll get a pizza-and-beer party invite."
He stifled a small, sad laugh. "You're always welcome to pizza on me, Marcus."
"Well, that's good," I said. "Keep them honest, okay?"
"I'll certainly try."
"And keep yourself honest."
"Yes, that much you can be sure of," he said.
I walked away.
As I walked into the night, back toward home, I felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders. It's funny, because I assumed that after I started the chain of events that would lead to Carrie Johnstone's d0x ending up in an FBI agent's possession, I would be clobbered by worry. Would Carrie Johnstone come back for me? Would Zyz come after me? They'd have no reason to assume I turned over the d0x to the FBI, but no reason not to, either. Hell, maybe the FBI wouldn't do anything -- what had Joe said?
Even the most foolish, vicious Feeb at HQ in DC has some self-respect and doesn't want to be used as a game token by scheming politicians who're hoping to score points with the electorate during the midterms.
Maybe they'd just drop it in a shredder.
But somehow, that little voice I knew to be my own, the little voice that told me all the time about the ways I'd screwed up, the way I'd let other people do the driving, the way I let life push me around -- that little voice shut up the instant I did something. And not just something: the exact thing I knew to be right. Because if the system was broken, if Carrie Johnstone wasn't going to ever pay consequences for her actions, it wasn't because "the system" failed to get her. It was because people like me chose not to act when we could. The system was people, and I was part of it, part of its problems, and I was going to be part of the solution from now on.
Politics and Prose: DC
This chapter is dedicated to DC's Politics and Prose, a wonderful store inside the beltway. As the name implies, the store is perfectly balanced mix of the wonky and the wonderful, policy and poetry living cheek-by-jowl. This is a store that puts a lie to the idea that the fanciful and the hard-nosed are incompatible -- a conclusion that I should hope was obvious from my own books.
I'd had eight months to debug Secret Project X-1. I even made a special midsummer trip to the Mojave, where the gypsum dust was nearly identical to the stuff you got out on the playa. I'd watched with glee and pride as X-1 sucked up the sun's rays, turned them into a laser beam, and used that to sinter fine white powder into 3D shapes. First a little skull ring. Then a toy car. Then some chain mail, the links already formed and joined, one of the coolest tricks 3D printing had to offer. I gave a presentation on my progress one night at Noisebridge and the resulting praise had given me a glow you could have seen with a spy drone.
But
now
,
here
, on the
actual
playa, the goddamned machine
wouldn't work
. Lemmy sat in his lounger nearby, sipping electrolyte drink from a camelbak and making helpful suggestions, as well as several unhelpful ones. Burners passing by stopped and asked what I was doing, and I let Lemmy explain it to them so that I could concentrate on the infernal and stubborn machine.
I only stopped when I found that even the light from my headlamp wasn't sufficient for seeing what I was doing, and then I stretched all the aches and pains out of my body, swilled a pint of cold-brew, and proceeded to dance my skinny ass off for forty-five minutes straight, chasing after a giant art car blasting ferocious dubstep as it crawled across the open playa. I stopped as a thunderstrike of inspiration struck me, and I
ran
straight back to camp, unlocked Lemmy's car, and used its dome light to confirm that yes, I had in fact inserted a critical part of the power assembly backwards. I turned it around, slotted it in, and heard the familiar boot sequence kick in as the stored power from the solar panels kicked the 3D printer to life.
I wasn't a total moron after all.
It didn't matter how much dancing I'd done the night before, I was for goddamned sure getting up at first light to crank up X-1. I had a lot of printing to do. I puttered around it as the blue arc of laser light shone out of its guts, making it glow like a lantern in the pink dawn.
People stopped and asked me what it was doing. I gave them trinkets: bone-white skull rings; renderings of perfect knots and other mathematical solids; strange, ghostly figurines. I had a whole library of 3D shapes I'd plundered from Thingiverse when I realized that I was going to have a real, functional 3D printer on the playa this year. Word got around, and by the time Lemmy got out of bed, a huge crowd had gathered around our camp, dancers who'd been up all night, their pupils the size of saucers; early risers with yoga mats; college kids who'd somehow found themselves at the burn; and a familiar jawa with crossed bandoliers over her chest, emphasizing her breasts.
"Hi, Ange," I said, leaving Lemmy to run the machine while I grabbed us a jar of cold-brew and walked off a ways with her. She pulled down her mask. The sun had toasted a smattering of freckles around her nose and cheeks. I gave her first slurp at the coffee, then I had one. Then we hugged. It was awkward.
It was wonderful.
"Hey, Marcus. Congratulations on getting it working."
"Yeah," I said. All I wanted to do was hug her again.
"So," I said.
"So," she said.
"I'm an idiot," I said.
"Yeah," she said.
"I've missed you."
"Yeah," she said again. "I missed you, too. Like fire. Like part of me had been cut away."
I dropped my voice. "I gave Johnstone's d0x to the FBI."
She blinked twice. "When?"
"Back in October."
"And you're still here, huh?"
"Yeah," I said. "I guess that means they didn't do anything with it."
"Or maybe it means they
did
do something with it."
I found my mouth was hanging open. "You know," I said. "That possibility never occurred to me."
"Yeah," she said. "You have a tendency to see the bad side of things."
"I guess I do."
We didn't say anything for a while, just drank our coffee.
"Have you seen anything great yet?"
"No," I said. "I've been working on that goddamned machine since the moment we arrived."
"I haven't been to the temple yet," she said.
I took the hint. "I bet Lemmy'll be okay with the printer for a while."
"You think?"
"Yeah. Let's go."
"You spending much time at the protests?" she said.
"Every day," I said. "Trying to figure out how to do more with the kind of technology we build at Noisebridge to help make them harder to bust up. Better anti-kettling stuff, HERF shielding, effective treatments for gas poisoning and those dazzler lasers and sound cannons they're using now. Been arrested a few times, but I keep going back."
"I think that's great," she said. "Seriously great. I'm proud of you."
"Thank you," I said. "That means a lot." It really did. I didn't hold her hand, but oh, how I wanted to. "What about you?"
"College," she said. "College, college, college. Doing a double courseload to get out as fast as I can. My student debt, God, it's like the national debt of some drowning island nation."
"There's still time to drop out," I said.
"Yeah, yeah. We can't all be professional revolutionaries."
Not if you're drowning in student debt
, is what I didn't say, because I didn't want to fight with Ange. More than anything, I didn't want to fight with Ange.
The temple came into sight. It was even more amazing than last year's, and it was surrounded by art bikes and milling crowds of people dropping off their memorials or reading them or making them. By the same unspoken agreement, we walked to them in silence.
By some unspoken agreement, we took each others' hands.
When we sat down in the central atrium and the first deep
Omm
moved through us, tears began to flow. Ange was crying, and so was I. Our fingers were interlocked, and squeezed so hard that my knuckles creaked. But the sound kept coming, and with it, a kind of peace. Peace wasn't something I'd had much of in the last year, and I barely recognized it -- and then I sank into it.
My eyes closed, I sensed someone settle to the floor next to me. I opened my eyes. I knew before they opened who it would be.
Masha's hair was pink again, and she looked better than she had the last time I'd seen her, but she also looked older. There were deep worry lines around her mouth and eyes. They looked good on her somehow. Her eyes were the same, and just as I'd remembered them.
She and I looked into each other's eyes for a long time. I squeezed Ange's fingers and sensed her looking at Masha, too. The three of us stared at one another, three pairs of eyes, three brains, three sets of hands, three
people
inside the crowd, inside the temple, inside Black Rock City, on the skin of the planet.
Then Masha stood up, blew us both a kiss, and smiled in a way that made her look ten years old and made me feel like I'd been blessed by a holy woman. I gathered Ange into a hug that started off stiff and awkward and then turned into the most familiar feeling in the world.
Books of Wonder: NYC
This section is dedicated to New York City's Books of Wonder, the oldest and largest kids' bookstore in Manhattan. They're located just a few blocks away from Tor Books' offices in the Flatiron Building and every time I drop in to meet with the Tor people, I always sneak away to Books of Wonder to peruse their stock of new, used and rare kids' books. I'm a heavy collector of rare editions of Alice in Wonderland, and Books of Wonder never fails to excite me with some beautiful, limited-edition Alice. They have tons of events for kids and one of the most inviting atmospheres I've ever experienced at a bookstore.
